Critical Response #2

As Moraga states "I am a Chicana lesbian. My own particular relationship to being a sexual person; and a radical stand in direct contradiction to, and in violation of, the women I was raised to be." Through the poetry, prose, and personal stories in Loving in the War Years. This book shows how Moraga was struggling between her identity and family community. I felt the word “war” emphasis the conflicts and battle of Moraga. It is a war that Moraga or any one facing our stories, choices, and identity. When the phrase “queer” still not recognize by the society, also means that people do not have many choices to express themselves. Be seen but still be loved, is the deepest desire of LGBTQ communities. Moraga examines the collective sexual and cultural wounding suffered by women since the Conquest. Moraga examines her own mestiza parentage and the seemingly inescapable choice of assimilation into a passionless whiteness or uncritical acquiescence to the patriarchal Chicano culture she was raised to reproduce. By finding Chicana feminism and honoring her own sexuality and loyalty to other women of color, Moraga finds a way to claim both her family and her freedom.

Gender is an idea that is based on what we socially believe. Am I a woman because when I was a kid my mother wanted me to play with dolls? These social cues are what mainly divides men from women. Men are supposed to be tough because society made them that way. Women are weak because society made them that way. We're not born this way, we are made this way. Gender is our obligations to history and society. Gender is constructed as evident through the cross cultural differences both temporal and spatial. Gender is not what you think of who you want to be. Gender is what people around you look who you are. What is gender identity? Identity is performativity constituted by the very expressions that are said to be its results. In other words, gender is a performance; it's what you do at particular times, rather than a universal who you are. Judith Butler argues that we all put on a gender performance, whether traditional or not, anyway, and so it is not a question of whether to do a gender performance, but what form that performance will take. By choosing to be different about it, we might work to change gender norms and the binary understanding of masculinity and femininity. This idea of identity as free-floating, as not connected to an essence, but instead a performance, is one of the key ideas in queer theory. Seen in this way, our identities, gendered and otherwise, do not express some authentic inner core self but are the dramatic effect rather than the cause of our performances. While this is not to negate biological categorizations of sex. Sex is not gender and as most people confuse. Our identity is not to be equated with gender.

Additionally, these are categories that are culturally constructed since they are fluid. What it means to be a man and woman have changed in the last 50 years alone. There is no denying gender roles changed and thus accept that these are things that societies construct. While sex is pre-determined, even though that can change, gender changes.